Alex Sanders

Alex Sanders (6 June 1926 - 30 April, 1988), born Orrell Alexander Carter, was an English occultist and High Priest in the Neopagan religion of Wicca, responsible for founding the tradition of Alexandrian Wicca during the 1960s. He was a figure who often appeared in tabloid newspapers. Being raised in a working class family, he was introduced to esoteric ideas by his mother and grandmother from a young age, and as a young man began working as a medium in the local Spiritualist Churches before going on to study and practice ceremonial magic.

In 1963, he was initiated into Gardnerian Wicca before founding his own coven, through which he merged many aspects of ceremonial magic into Gardnerianism, falsely then trying to pass off this tradition, Alexandrianism, as a hereditary tradition that had been handed down to him by his grandmother. Throughout the 1960s, he would court publicity in the press, appearing in a number of documentaries, marrying the far younger Maxine Sanders, and being declared to be the ‘King of the Witches’ by his followers, something that led to other prominent Gardnerian Witches, such as Patricia Crowther and Eleanor Bone, attacking him in the press. In the late 1970s and 1980s, he went on to work with a ceremonial magical group known as the Ordine Della Luna, prior to his death.